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Annotate with Me: Romeo and Juliet

Hi friends! Welcome back to another Annotate with Me post! As we know, I am a Shakespeare fan first and human second, so today’s post is focused on one of my most favorite Shakespeare plays — Romeo and Juliet.

Something that particularly motivated me to work on this post is that I see so many people say that the only reason why they don’t read Shakespeare is that they don’t really understand the language and that makes them feel inferior or unintelligent. That truly breaks my heart! I started reading Shakespeare when I was around fourteen, and I loved it but didn’t fully understand it. Then in college, as a theatre major, we had an entire class on Shakespeare, and my love kind of turned into an obsession because I was able to really understand and dissect his works. That is to say: no one is “not smart enough” to understand Shakespeare, you just need to spend a little more time learning how to read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote for the masses, and I feel strongly that everyone should be exposed to his writing because he wrote about the spectrum of human emotion. I personally have learned so much through reading Shakespeare and that is thanks to the teachers I had who helped me understand him. While I am in no way a Shakespeare expert, I do think that I have a good grasp of his works and I would love to help others develop a love for him as well. And, to be 100% transparent I have SparkNotes and CliffsNotes open while I read as it usually helps me process my thoughts, and remember what happens in which scenes, since in the case of Romeo and Juliet, I’ve read it so many times that sometimes the minute details blend together.

So, all that being said, whether you love Shakespeare or not, I hope you enjoy hearing my thoughts, observations, and analysis on one of my all-time favorite stories, Romeo and Juliet. 

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Annotate with Me: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Part 1)

Hello friends! September 30th was the 154th anniversary of the release of Little Women,  and I thought that this would be the perfect time to post part one of my two-part Annotate with Me series on Little Women!

Nowadays, editions of Little Women are printed with both volumes (Little Women and Good Wives), but in 1868, only volume one, Little Women was published. Because of that, this post will focus on some of my favorite scenes from volume one!

Get cozy, grab a cup of tea, and let’s annotate volume one of Little Women!

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Let’s Talk: Books I Picked Up Because of Booktok

Hi friends! Happy Friday! I figured it’d be fun to talk about some books I picked up because of booktok, and what my thoughts were on them today. It’s truly incredible to see the influence that booktok has on the book community. Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I almost always see a “Popular on Booktok” table, and it’s always fascinating to see what’s on there — and also how a lot of those tables seem to lack diverse recommendations. Whether that’s a fault of Booktok itself, publishing, peoples For You Pages, or a combination of all three, it’s definitely fascinating. Still, Booktok has often added new books to my radar, and encouraged me to read things that I might not have picked up before. This post is mostly me being a hater, but there are some books I genuinely enjoyed here — as well as some books I added to my TBR because of Booktok.

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Annotate with Me: If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe! This week, I’m bringing you another Annotate with Me post, and this time I’m highlighting my favorite book — If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio!

I did annotate a copy of If We Were Villains earlier this year, but I did so before I really started to develop my process for annotating, so, I wanted to try again with my more specific and detailed system. I also thought this was the perfect time to do so because I’ve (unintentionally) reread If We Were Villains on September 14th for the last two years — so it made sense to do a reread and re-annotation this month!

This post is basically all spoilers — I can’t really get into the nitty gritty parallels, influences, and foreshadowing without doing so — so if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend reading it and then checking this post! Okay, it’s gonna be a long one, friends, so get comfy, grab some tea, and let’s get started!

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Annotate with Me: Babel by R.F. Kuang

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.

Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.

Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?

Links for Babel: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound

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Annotate with Me: Portrait of a Thief

Hi, besties! As I am fully in my annotations era, I thought it would be fun to start a new post series called Annotate with Me. In this series, I’ll be highlighting one of the books that I’ve recently annotated, show you what supplies I used, share photos of my annotations and discuss some of the things I chose to highlight and comment on throughout the book. Since we just wrapped up our read of Grace D. Li’s Portrait of a Thief for TeaTimeReads, I figured this would be the perfect book to start with!

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Let’s Talk: Partial August TBR

Happy “salt air and the rust on your door” month to all that celebrate! With August comes the end of the summer camp program that I run — we officially wrap up on the 12th — and I’ll be taking some time off work to rest and recharge before starting our fall programs. I’m planning on getting a lot of reading done in the 2 weeks I’ll be off work and I thought it would be fun to share some of my August TBR with all of you!

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Let’s Talk: My Favorite Reads of 2022 Part 1

Hi besties! Can you believe we’re at the end of June? I truly cannot. I know I say it all the time, but time really is just a construct isn’t it? I hope that the first half of the year has treated you well and that the second half has many magical things coming your way!

With the first half of the year coming to a close, you know what it’s time for. It’s time for the first part of my Favorite Reads of 2022 post! I love doing these each year because it’s so fun to take a look at all the books I’ve read so far and highlight my favorites. As of the end of June, I’ve read 138 books, and as you can expect, with a number like that it was a little tricky to narrow this list down to the 16 books that I’m featuring.

Y’all know the drill — no rereads are listed here, all of these books are ones that I read for the first time this year, so that you don’t hear me once again go on and on about my love for certain books (iykyk). 

As always, I have done my best to list trigger warnings based on my own personal notes, trigger warnings from other reviews and what is listed on websites like Book Trigger Warnings and Trigger Warning Database if needed. That being said, there may be things that I have forgotten and if so I apologize! If you’ve read any of these books and notice that I’m missing some triggers, please let me know so that I can update the trigger lists!

✩ indicates an ARC / Read as an ARC

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